Looking For A Place To Race My Gen 2

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PostPosted: Mon Jun 10, 2019 9:49 am
Good morning. I realize that there are other avenues that can provide the answers to my questions that follow. However, I am hoping that since you guys are heavily involved maybe you know the answers off the top of your (collective) heads.

To begin with, I raced in the Washington DC region of the NE Division from 1973 until the end of 2004, when I suspended my racing to concentrate on sailing my sailboat around the world. Fast forward 15 years and I am now living in Houston, TX and am ready to begin racing again. However, things seem to have changed dramatically. When I left in 2004 the SRF was eligible to race in Regionals, Nationals, and maybe the Pro series-I can’t remember when Pro racing stopped-I do know that I competed in one SRF pro race at VIR although I’m not sure if that was 2002 or 2004.

But I digress…

Now in 2019 the event types seem to be Regionals, Majors, and Super Tours. I haven’t been able to figure out the difference between Major and Super Tour. However, that really has nothing to do with my confusion and frankly at this point I don’t really care about the difference. What I DO care about are the following:

1. From reading the threads here it seems that back in 2017 the Gen 2 cars were eligible to race in Regionals (and MAYBE eligible to race alongside Gen 3 cars while remaining compliant to Gen 2 specs). Was that only during the three year transition period or is this still the case?

2. As I mentioned above when I last raced it was in the Washington DC region. During the last quite a few years of that 30 year period the DC region provided the following EVERY year (although I seem to recall that they began including races at Beaver Run race track somewhere out near Pittsburg).

Anyway, here are the events offered as I recall them:
a. March: Drivers school at Summit Point
b. April: A MARRS (Mid Atlantic Road Racing Series) regional race at Summit Point
c. May (specifically Mother’s Day weekend): A combination MARRS/SARRC race at VIR
d. June: A National race at Summit Point
e. July: A Regional (and sometimes an enduro IIRC) at Summit Point
f. August: A National race at Summit Point
g. September (I think) and October: Regional Races at Summit Point
h. November: A driver’s school at Summit Point

That’s a pretty full calendar---some kind of club racing event each month between March and November.

So as I said I moved to and now live in SW Houston. When I got here I googled Houston race tracks and found that MSR Houston is one that’s a half hour from my house! I was thrilled as I’m sure you can imagine. But when I looked at the Houston region’s club racing calendar I found that there seems to be:

1. An August 31 Labor Day Triple Majors at MSR Houston;
2. A September 5th HOUSCCA Rookie Skool (I have no idea what this is-SCCA driver’s school maybe?) at the Houston Police Academy in North Houston
3. A November 8-10 Super School TT/RR races at Eagles Canyon Raceway somewhere NW of Dallas. Is this maybe a combination time trial (whatever that might be) and regional races???

That appears to be it for racing in the Houston region. Now to be fair the Houston Region’s calendar did not allow me to go backward beyond today so maybe their calendar is front-loaded, I don’t know. I do know that the MSR Houston Raceway’s calendar is blank with regard to SCCA racing so maybe being that close is not the bonus that I thought it was going to be.

So after all that rambling my real question is: Am I missing something here or did I just happen to (in 1973) by pure luck fall into a region (the DC one) that is heavily invested in racing while the Houston region is much less so? If this is true then where do Houston racers race? For that matter does the Houston region even have a regional racing series?

I hope it’s obvious to you that I am looking for a venue that's hopefully reasonably close by in which to RACE my Gen 2 car--I'm not interested in Autocrossing it. From what I have read only about half the SRFs have been converted to Gen 3 specs. If that is correct then there is a boatload of Gen 2s around somewhere. Are they all just sitting up on jack stands or what?

Thanks for your patience if you got this far.
Ray Russell
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PostPosted: Mon Jun 10, 2019 10:23 am
Sadly Gen2 only ran as a national class during the transition period. It's still a regional class, and can be specifically included in events by the supps, but Super Tour (a subset of Majors races) only takes national classes. (Unless I'm wrong, which would be nice)

Check in with your local CSR, Dave Perkins at Spec Racer Sports, but...

End of June there's a race at COTA in Austin, which is an easy tow and the supps mention SRF. Same weekend as a regional at Hallett, outside Tulsa.
Mid July there's a Majors in Topeka.
I think that September event is for autocross.
The ECR super school is news to me, I thought they normally did that in January at MSR-Cresson (south of Ft Worth).

Generally we do all our racing in the spring and late fall (after the runoffs). We used to have a race at NOLA and I hope that comes back.

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PostPosted: Mon Jun 10, 2019 8:18 pm
pmiranda wrote:Sadly Gen2 only ran as a national class during the transition period. It's still a regional class, and can be specifically included in events by the supps, but Super Tour (a subset of Majors races) only takes national classes. (Unless I'm wrong, which would be nice)

Check in with your local CSR, Dave Perkins at Spec Racer Sports, but...

End of June there's a race at COTA in Austin, which is an easy tow and the supps mention SRF. Same weekend as a regional at Hallett, outside Tulsa.
Mid July there's a Majors in Topeka.
I think that September event is for autocross.
The ECR super school is news to me, I thought they normally did that in January at MSR-Cresson (south of Ft Worth).

Generally we do all our racing in the spring and late fall (after the runoffs). We used to have a race at NOLA and I hope that comes back.


Thanks, I appreciate your having taken the time to reply. Bummer that they no longer allow the Gen 2 cars to run nationally at all. But it's not really a surprise. I remember when they put a hard stop to the Renaults, although I recall that the Fords were truly leaps and bounds better cars, starting with the shift linkages. Having never driven a Gen 3 car I don't know whether there's a parallel here or not.

I would certainly pay the $15k to get that kind of advantage over my competitors (lol, I actually wouldn't) but to pay that kind of money for exactly the same thing that everyone else has just for the sake of having nothing more than a faster car (if that's truly all it is and I of course don't know that) doesn't really interest me. There would have to be a more compelling reason IMHO.

With that said, I certainly get it that Enterprises wants to twist owners' arms to get them to convert but my car only cost me $11,000 exactly when I bought it in I think 1984 or 1985 (admittedly with Renault's subsidy), so $14 or $15k for just an engine is pretty hard to swallow, although with what seems to be a dearth of regional races in my neck of the woods it may wind up being the only game in town.
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PostPosted: Tue Jun 11, 2019 12:07 am
I believe you can still run the Gen2 nationally (read "@ majors"), you'll just be non-competitive as it'll be classed with Gen3.
Definitely contact Dave Perkins at Spec Racer Sports. You can run at MSRH as a member and they do have some divisional (used to be "regional) races there I believe as well.
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PostPosted: Tue Jun 11, 2019 6:03 am
Racer X wrote:I believe you can still run the Gen2 nationally (read "@ majors"), you'll just be non-competitive as it'll be classed with Gen3.
Definitely contact Dave Perkins at Spec Racer Sports. You can run at MSRH as a member and they do have some divisional (used to be "regional) races there I believe as well.


Thank you for your reply. In that event I guess the only thing that I could do would would be to "race" any other Gen 2 cars that might show up as well as to measure my progress against old typical Gen 2 race results. As woeful as that might be it would still beat watching from the other side of the fence.

On the other hand, I suppose that would be a pretty expensive time trial, especially if no other Gen 2's showed up that day...

PS: I watched a 3 or 4 year old YouTube video of you at the Glen the other day and quickly came to realize why I could never have won there. Watching your car rotating around its COG while going full throttle down into the boot was unbelievable. I had no idea that a car could be driven that hard with guard rails a foot off the track surface. Kudos to the person who set your car up too. If that was you then you are a wizard.

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PostPosted: Tue Jun 11, 2019 6:07 am
Racer X wrote:I believe you can still run the Gen2 nationally (read "@ majors"), you'll just be non-competitive as it'll be classed with Gen3.
Definitely contact Dave Perkins at Spec Racer Sports. You can run at MSRH as a member and they do have some divisional (used to be "regional) races there I believe as well.

Oops, forgot the most important part: I will definitely contact him. I want to drive over anyway and see what the place looks like. It's about a half hour from my house.

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PostPosted: Tue Jun 11, 2019 1:03 pm
You'll like Dave; he's a good guy. My son and I tried out a couple of his Gen3 cars last summer and enjoyed them. We're looking for an alternative to our Spec Miata and Mustang. There is a race Aug31- Sep1 at MSR. Not a big fan of MSR but did their Comp school last January.
Its the only game in town since TWS closed.

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PostPosted: Tue Jun 11, 2019 2:17 pm
bojets wrote:You'll like Dave; he's a good guy. My son and I tried out a couple of his Gen3 cars last summer and enjoyed them. We're looking for an alternative to our Spec Miata and Mustang. There is a race Aug31- Sep1 at MSR. Not a big fan of MSR but did their Comp school last January.
Its the only game in town since TWS closed.


I will be there!
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PostPosted: Fri Jun 14, 2019 12:52 pm
We still have a good number of GEN2's running a regional races in the San Francisco region, about 1/3 of the cars are GEN2's and we typically have over 30 cars at regional races.

I bet there are still a lot of GEN2's out there that are not running in your region, You might want to reach out to others in your region and surrounding regions to see if you can get a group to run. Our region still runs a lot of non-national classes like GEN2's, DSR's and Club Fords, the old Formula Fords.

Good luck finding someone to race with.

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